“Winter is coming” is the motto of House Stark in “Game of Thrones”, the George R.R. Martin fantasy novel and HBO series. It’s also a warning about climatic disaster and otherworldly forces threatening the story’s imaginary continent of Westeros. It’s a warning for us as well.

Supernatural elements usually take center stage in fantasy but seem secondary in “Game of Thrones”. Yet their seeming marginalization makes them all the more significant and provides an unsettling, real-world parallel.

Most of the story focuses on the brutal political machinations of the human characters vying for control of Westeros. They dismiss as fairy tales such things as the White Walkers — ancient, malevolent beings on the move beyond Westeros’ wall in the far north.

As clans slaughter one another, the supernatural forces draw closer. Wiser parties raise the alarm, but are largely ignored. You can imagine where this is ultimately headed.

The story works as a parable for our own world. We face our own climatic catastrophe — not a supernatural threat, but one substantiated by science. But for many Americans, science is no more believable than magic is for the Westerosi, so global warming is ignored.

In the July Ipsos MORI survey of people in 20 nations, the U.S. ranked last in agreement with the statement, “We are heading for environmental disaster unless we change our habits quickly.” A March Gallup Poll found that only 36 percent of Americans believe climate change will seriously threaten their way of life during their lifetimes. A Gallup Poll last month has climate change last among 13 issues registered voters were asked to rank in importance.

At work could be how Americans tend to equate nature with wilderness, something outside civilization, like the distant waste beyond Westeros’ wall. We view environmental change as external to society, as at best secondary to seemingly more pressing issues such as the economy or national security — though climate change has serious implications for both.

The undeniable urgency of unemployment, terrorism and Ebola do not mean climate change is any less important. Yet we act that way more often than not. On the very same day that the huge People’s Climate March marked the culmination of years of activism, the Sunday political talk shows ignored it. Climate change was not even mentioned during the 2012 presidential debates.

Barack Obama hasn’t been that much different. Despite doing more than any other U.S. president to address climate change, he has stood to the side, sometimes cheering, during a vast expansion of fossil fuel production in the U.S. now reshaping world markets. High gasoline prices that once spurred alternative fuels and electric vehicles might not be back for a long time.

Even as emissions and temperatures rise, the Arctic melts, methane bubbles up from the sea floor and oceans acidify, many still regard climate like the weather, an external phenomenon beyond human influence. Thus the common, dismissive refrain, recently echoed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.: “Our climate is always changing.”

The longer we remain focused on seemingly serious short-term concerns while ignoring what is just on the other side of the wall, the more we’ll wish “winter is coming.”

For us, a long hot summer is on the way.

Peter F. Cannavò is associate professor of government and director of the Environmental Studies Program at Hamilton College.